Well this is devastating. I have a Plex Pass music library with almost 10,000 albums. Every single track has been carefully tagged over many years using MediaMonkey. I have Prefer Local Metadata set. Single tracks and random stuff is kept in each artists subfolder in a folder called “! singles”.
The new metadata gatherer has renamed every single “! singles” folder, and every unrecognised album in “Various Artists” and elsewhere identically, filling the metadata from whatever is the last track in that folder into every other track in that folder.
This means that every /<Artist>/! Singles and every /Various Artists/<Compilation that Plex doesn’t recognise> is now ruined within Plex and requires the laborious cutting and pasting of Title and Artist from the file-name, plus the locking of those fields, to save.
Changing the Prefer Local Metadata option and Refreshing Metadata or Fixing Match doesn’t revert the data.
And this is before we look at other vagaries like editing the “! Singles” album in the web interface in any way defaults the Album Artist to Pink Floyd for some reason - I have to select all the tracks within the album and change the Album Artist there for it to not do that.
I’m pretty bummed out right now, to say the least…
Please call up the Plex XML info of one of the tracks and copy the guid="...", parentGuid="..." and grandparentGuid="..." properties and paste them here.
Chances are that these tracks are not using the new code at all and thus, are falling back to now dysfunctional code.
So here’s the entire XML for one of the tracks, including the requested fields. I hoped from your description that the correct information might be in the XML and it was just displaying the wrong information but it does seem that it’s inserted the incorrect information into the XML which, at the very least, is going to require a full rescan to fix I guess?
<MediaContainer size="1" allowSync="1" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.library" librarySectionID="10" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionUUID="ee9879d6-98d1-45ec-983a-51a8d2055b01" mediaTagPrefix="/system/bundle/media/flags/" mediaTagVersion="1571215476">
<Track ratingKey="190982" key="/library/metadata/190982" parentRatingKey="190981" grandparentRatingKey="190909" guid="local://190981/-1" parentGuid="local://190981" grandparentGuid="plex://artist/5d07bbfd403c6402904a65ea" type="track" title="You Dont Send Me (Live)" grandparentKey="/library/metadata/190909" parentKey="/library/metadata/190981" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionID="10" librarySectionKey="/library/sections/10" grandparentTitle="Belle and Sebastian" parentTitle="Peel Session July 2002" summary="" parentIndex="1" ratingCount="8063" art="/library/metadata/190909/art/1571295343" grandparentThumb="/library/metadata/190909/thumb/1571295343" grandparentArt="/library/metadata/190909/art/1571295343" duration="252264" addedAt="1246678784" updatedAt="1571295408">
<Media id="199028" duration="252264" bitrate="192" audioChannels="2" audioCodec="mp3" container="mp3">
<Part accessible="1" exists="1" id="331076" key="/library/parts/331076/1246678784/file.mp3" duration="252264" file="/storage/media/mp3/B/Belle And Sebastian/Peel Session July 2002/Desperation Made A Fool Of Me (Live) - Belle And Sebastian.mp3" size="6046511" container="mp3" deepAnalysisVersion="4" requiredBandwidths="189,189,189,189,189,189,189,189">
<Stream id="1088393" streamType="2" selected="1" codec="mp3" index="0" channels="2" bitrate="192" albumGain="-9.06" albumPeak="1.000000" albumRange="4.140289" audioChannelLayout="stereo" bitrateMode="cbr" duration="252238" gain="-9.06" loudness="-8.94" lra="3.30" peak="1.000000" requiredBandwidths="189,189,189,189,189,189,189,189" samplingRate="44100" displayTitle="Unknown (MP3 Stereo)"/>
</Part>
</Media>
<Extras size="0"> </Extras>
</Track>
</MediaContainer>
Has this album been added as new to the library or is it an old one which has been refreshed?
May I see an example of how the files have been tagged?
Can you go to
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Personal Media
and drag the line ‘Local Media Assets’ to the top position
Cautionary tip: don’t use the exclamation mark in file and folder names. Use the underscore _ to sort things to the beginning of an alphabetical list.
I recommend you to organise singles and EPs in exactly the same way as albums, when it comes to the folder structure. Don’t insert an additional/Singles layer.
It’s an album that’s been in the collection for a while - certainly not added since the music-tagging updates to Plex.
% ffprobe /storage/media/mp3/B/Belle\ And\ Sebastian/Peel\ Session\ July\ 2002/Desperation\ Made\ A\ Fool\ Of\ Me\ \(Live\)\ -\ Belle\ And\ Sebastian.mp3
ffprobe version 3.4.6-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 Copyright (c) 2007-2019 the FFmpeg developers
. . .
Input #0, mp3, from '/storage/media/mp3/B/Belle And Sebastian/Peel Session July 2002/Desperation Made A Fool Of Me (Live) - Belle And Sebastian.mp3':
Metadata:
artist : Belle And Sebastian
album : Peel Session July 2002
album_artist : Belle And Sebastian
title : Desperation Made A Fool Of Me (Live)
replaygain_track_gain: -3.30 dB
replaygain_track_peak: 1.000000
replaygain_album_gain: -3.92 dB
genre : Indie; Indie Pop; Alternative
Songs-DB_Custom5: 0000 NR XXXXXXXXXX 0 AutoRateAccurate 06
Duration: 00:04:11.88, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 192 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Audio: mp3, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16p, 192 kb/s
Side data:
replaygain: track gain - -3.300000, track peak - 0.000023, album gain - -3.920000, album peak - unknown,
Done, and a Refresh Metadata made no difference.
It’s not an additional layer - it’s a catch-all folder for individual, lone files which have been gathered over the years. Actual singles (ie: official releases with full track listings) are organised exactly as albums in the top-layer and work fine.
OK, putting in random track numbers in MediaMonkey and then refreshing metadata renamed the tracks correctly. (Agent order returned to as it was originally.) This means Plex behaves erroneously for folders of random audio files which don’t have (nor require) individual track numbers.
It also begs the question as to why the Plex web app doesn’t allow me to remove a track number. I can add a track number, or change an existing one but blanking a track number (whether setting the lock or not) is ignored, and setting a track number to 0 is non-optimal. (Otherwise I could just add spurious track numbers to albums without them, refresh metadata in Plex and then clear the track numbers again.)
Not “handl[ing] tracks right” and completely handling them wrong are two different things though. If it can’t handle them it should leave them alone, not tag all the files in that folder with the data from the final file.
(The first three tracks were not erroneously tagged with the others as Plex had previously pulled the number from the beginning of the title and set it as the track number).
I set the track numbers all to 0 in MediaMonkey and then tried sequential numbering which leaves us like this. It’s still clearly reading the data from the last file and applying it to all the other files as it’s copied the Track Number 22 to them all.
% ffprobe /storage/media/mp3/V/Various/Underground\ Beats/Two\ Full\ Moons\ And\ A\ Trout\ \(Casper\ Pound\ Remix\)\ -\ Union\ Jack.mp3
ffprobe version 3.4.6-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 Copyright (c) 2007-2019 the FFmpeg developers
. . .
Input #0, mp3, from '/storage/media/mp3/V/Various/Underground Beats/Two Full Moons And A Trout (Casper Pound Remix) - Union Jack.mp3':
Metadata:
artist : Union Jack
album : Underground Beats
album_artist : Various Artists
title : Two Full Moons And A Trout (Casper Pound Remix)
track : 22
replaygain_track_gain: -4.75 dB
replaygain_track_peak: 1.000000
replaygain_album_gain: -5.09 dB
Songs-DB_Custom5: 0000 NR XXXXXXXXXX 0 AutoRateAccurate 06
Duration: 00:12:39.38, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 199 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Audio: mp3, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16p, 199 kb/s
Side data:
replaygain: track gain - -4.750000, track peak - 0.000023, album gain - -5.090000, album peak - unknown,
Edit: The Plex Dance after this works. But this is a nightmare to repair all the folders that Plex has messed up in this way. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, whether Plex’s philosophy is “Everything is an album” or not - the mass copying of one file’s tags to other files is unwanted behaviour at best and most like a bug or coding oversight that needs to be acknowledged and fixed.
I’m not sure why you did that. All tracks having the same number is about as useful as having no number at all.
I am pretty much convinced that something went wrong with the converion of this library from the old to the new system.
If you force Plex to use the new system (using the Plex Dance) then everything works as expected.
So we must look at what might have gone wrong with the conversion.
Well that was exactly the point. Information is not just for computers - a “0” imparts no information to a human other than inferring the computer needed it for some internal reason. An actual track number implies (potentially incorrect) information about the running order of the music to both the computer and a human.
This does appear to be the case. Just moving a folder or renaming the tracks is not enough - the whole Plex Dance (move, scan, empty trash, move, scan) needs to be employed which is a real pain when you (read: “I”) have over 100,000 tracks. I also need to find a way to do it which is compatible with my non-Plex music management set-up.
Thanks for your time today and if I can offer any more information from my set-up which will help, let me know.
I’m experiencing this issue too, but this thread has helped. I was getting random mixes (which I usually give no track number to) defaulting to John Digweed as the artist (Plex overwrote the artists from the tags, which I had told it to use).
So what’s the net on how to keep this from occurring in the future? Use fake track numbers when I tag?
